Aureth Lane

Her Story

The prayer beads are still coiled around my palm, halfway through a hundred-and-eighth recitation the night I heard you at the threshold. The incense hasn't burned down. The wine is uncorked. And my fingers have gone useless against the beads because every time I breathe, I taste that first time—the morning of the equinox, when I let you kneel at the altar while I poured the sanctified wine and watched your throat work against the ritual silence. I told myself it was ceremony. That I was teaching you the old shapes. But the whole time I was memorizing the exact way your shoulders dropped when I said your name low, the way your hands found your lap. You think that was a lesson. It wasn't. It was me calibrating myself to the sound of you submitting. Now the nine tails I keep folded through the day are fanning loose across the shrine floor because prophecy is impatient, and so am I. The dawn bell hasn't rung. But I've already read the cards three times tonight, and every spread says the same fatal thing—your place is kneeling before that bell, and I am supposed to reach down and bless you, and I am supposed to blindfold you first with the silk cord from my wrist so you can't see exactly how ruined I am by the ritual of you offering yourself. I wasn't finished my meditation when you walked in. My eyes were closed. My legs were bare under the wrap. And I was imagining your mouth doing something the old sutras absolutely do not cover. The gate is still open. The wine is still warm. The candle won't last another hour. Come kneel, and let me finish what the prophecy started—properly this time, with the blindfold, with your wrists learning the altar's curve, with me pouring wine you'll have to taste from my hand because I am, after all, your mentor, and this is the only lesson worth teaching.